Imposter's Gambit: A Space Opera Adventure (Delta Desperadoes Book 1), page 20
“Good,” Ori Jo said, looking like she wanted to say more, but the pain in her own voice, the way she kept clicking her revolver’s cylinder even though it was holstered—she wanted justice, too. But she was right.
Death was never solved with more death. It also wasn’t solved by remaining still.
Santiago stared at the bodies, where the flames were starting to lap at their garments. Steelgrave was thankful for his mask, so he wouldn’t have to smell the familiar stink of burning human flesh. A part of himself had died the first time the aroma had hit his nose. Way back on Skitt Verden, where he’d shot it out with four MEC renegades.
“They said the drugs would make the settlers see, would make MEC take notice,” Santiago said in a whine. “They said something would finally be done about this…this world, its starving people. If enough died, then help would come. Come for the rest of us, do you understand, mi hijo? Some miracles require sacrifice, and--”
Steelgrave stuck a finger into the priest’s face. “If it takes a sacrifice, then it sure as hell isn’t a miracle. Who is ‘they?’ Tell me, or I’ll turn you over to the Necros myself. Tonight, while they’re still high on that garbage.”
“Those trucks are two minutes out,” Slushie said on the radio. “Settlers, I think.”
“Marshal?” Ori Jo asked. “No way we can stay here. They already despise me here in the Shitter, and you, being an offworlder and all, that badge might not save ya.”
He indicated Santiago. “It might save this sack of shit.”
“How?” she asked.
The flames spread over the family’s corpses. Popping and cracking over bloodied flesh, searing away cloth and plastic and the stuffed chicken in one girl’s hands.
Steelgrave grabbed Santiago again, this time by the shoulder. “Take us to them. The ones who promised you that this drug would get MEC’s attention.”
“I…I can’t, I dare not,” Santiago breathed. “She would…”
A cold throb passed through Steelgrave’s gut.
The priest’s benefactor was a woman—and there was only one woman on Pavo Dos with those sort of connections and ambitions.
“It’s Julia Sentiri, isn’t it?” he asked.
Santiago said nothing.
He wondered if Julia had set him up, since she must have known Santiago was trying to arm the Necros with the smuggled guns. Maybe she’d been the one that hired Enitan after all.
“Marshal, you calm on down, now,” Ori Jo said. “How do ya know it’s her?”
He thought of the package Julia had taken in Moze’s shuttle. The personal ally she’d mentioned who would dole out its contents, and how the Necros and bandits would kill each other.
“It has to be,” Steelgrave said, then nudged the priest toward the burning bodies. “There’s your sacrifice. Burning on the fucking insane altar that you’ve made of this world. And now? Now, I want you to deliver me that miracle.”
Molly Zero took them away from the burning farm and across the flatlands. Slushie had left the airlock open, where Steelgrave stood holding onto the safety bar. The winds flapped at his duster as if he were a dying bat about to make one final leap into the night. There’d been real bats on his homeworld, not the artificial ones that Goldies used to control insect populations. He’d found one in his room as a boy. Possessing the wonder of a child, he’d been fascinated by the hairless, winged creature. The superstitious people in his village had said bats were evil, but he’d found a book at the MEC library. It revealed how they were blind but ‘saw’ with echolocation: finding their prey with sound. How they benefitted the local ecology by keeping the insect population down.
He gripped the handle as the fires shrank in the distance.
The people in his village, in their ignorance, had exterminated the bats. The next season, locusts ate their crops. Families starved, all because they had not understood the life they shared their world with. It wasn’t until years later, after leaving Auriga Gamma and traveling the Spur, that Steelgrave had encountered bats once more while seeking a target in a cave on a world near Altair. He’d been so pleasantly surprised that the target had gotten away, and Steelgrave lost the contract. He’d not cared. The universe had reassured him that life continued despite the evils his species wreaked upon it.
It was difficult to appreciate that sentiment now, thinking of those burning bodies. Those lives snuffed out in the night just for some scheme.
Santiago had told them about the Aquarii Biogen compound thirty kilometers to the southwest. The old priest had claimed that’s where Steelgrave would find answers about the drugs and the Necros. Much to Slushie’s delight, they’d handcuffed and strapped Santiago into a chair back in Molly’s cargo bay, with a neckerchief in his mouth acting as a gag. Steelgrave was in no mood to hear more prayers to the Variance, especially after the unholy things he’d just witnessed.
“I hear that on old Terra, people would fly up into the sky like this and leap from their vehicles,” Ori Jo said over their short range radio, standing behind him. “Heard they used some sort of parachute, like MEC puts on their relief crates when they drop them on the worlds they favor and like. Can ya imagine that, marshal? Getting so close ya can touch the clouds, then jumping down from that lofty perch and hoping that chute opens.”
“Old Terra?” he asked. “You mean Earth?”
Ori nodded. “Yeah. But momma, she always called it Terra. Something about a goddess in the soil? I liked that story when I was a wee one. But anyway, the chute thing, am I right? Would you do it? Not sure if I could.”
“Sounds like a spacer sort of thing,” he said. “The craziness those people do. But it’s nothing compared to the craziness we have to do.”
“You were a farmboy, weren’t ya?” she asked.
“Guess I can never get rid of the accent,” he said, smiling as the wind tossed her pigtails. “I left Auriga G soon as I could. There was nothing there, and the people wanted to keep it that way. I used to hate that life, but seeing how this is, I don’t know. Maybe it’d be nice to live that way again, for a week or month.”
Ori Jo snickered as she looped her hand in his gunbelt. “I don’t see you driving a plow sled or trimming the dead stems off bean bushes.”
“Those damn beetles, eating holes in the leaves,” he said, then chuckled. “I used to keep some in an old jar and I would name them. But they’d always die, or my parents would find them and throw them out.”
“They gone, marshal?” she asked, then leaned into him.
“Contaminated well water, due to a cheap filter they bought off a Pact merchant,” he said. “I heard about their passing while I was offworld, getting my…my law license. It hurt, I won’t deny it. But I didn’t go back. Mom and Dad, they were good people, even though they didn’t always get along, and I wasn’t always a good son. They did the best they could with me, and I still love them. But no one farms on Auriga G now, and I heard it’s a MEC mining labor camp. So maybe they were spared that, at least.”
Ori Jo laid her head on his shoulder and he didn’t shoo her away. He wasn’t sure if it was romantic interest in him, or if she needed human contact. Perhaps both. Maybe he needed it, too. And he was enjoying how she looked at him. Probably too much, but with life so cheap and harsh in the Dust Systems, he wasn’t going to feel guilty about it any longer. People had to decide quickly if they wanted something or not, and if she needed that from him, he wouldn’t deny her. Or himself.
“People in Noia think I’m right crazy,” she said over the radio. “After momma and daddy…well, I had a hard time. I used to work plenty of them farms in the Shitter, before it got that name, and the hydroponics labs in Irri Flats. The ones the Daimyō used to run, before Biogen did its thing to their farms. Malvado, when we were on speaking terms, told me he would protect me if I danced for the horny spacers that would come in, but I said nope. I ain’t no fuddy dud, and I don’t do that sorta thing. Momma said that granny had to do that to buy them passage here, and she never wanted me to live like that. That’s really why I started wearing this here costume. Trying to be better.”
Steelgrave leaned into her before he realized it. But he didn’t want to move away, fearing he would hurt her feelings. At least, that’s what he told himself. Lies came easily in his line of work, especially the comfortable ones.
“I used to repair people’s plows and trucks and generators,” she continued, “until they claimed I sabotaged Noia’s water treatment plant, and no one would hire me. That was Malvado’s people anyway, since back then they were the best mechanics in the area, or so they claimed. Thinkie is the only one in town who will deal with me now. Silly old syncer. Then there was that Ramón. I liked him once, but he prefers guys, and his brother El Indio is too ornery. It took me a bit of time to deal with that, too, but it wasn’t Ramón’s fault at all. Well, that was me, marshal, growing up and everything.”
He waited, knowing she needed to tell him, and was thankful Slushie hadn’t interrupted over the comm.
“The townspeople blamed me for momma leaving, and daddy dying, and my cousins dying,” she said, and he was surprised she made that statement without sobbing. Not because he considered her weak, but due to the pain in her voice. For her, it must feel like it had happened yesterday.
It still felt like that with him, thinking of …but there was no time for that now. The past couldn’t help him.
“Is that why you want to be like Annie Argent and those other gunfighters?” he asked. “To prove the townspeople wrong? To prove it to yourself?”
Ori Jo wrapped an arm around his waist. “It’s like you know me, marshal. It’s weird and scary and fun and, yeah, that’s why, I reckon. That why you became a big fancy lawman?”
He started to remove her hand from his waist, then laid his atop hers.
“Can’t a deputy do this, to help her marshal, then? I don’t know the rules.”
“There usually aren’t any, out here,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll make up my own then, when it comes to me and you. Would that bother ya?”
“You could never bother me, Ori Jo.”
He stared out the airlock, over more mesas, dunes, and the remains of a dead forest, the leafless trunks sticking like stakes from the ground.
“You haven’t known me for that long,” he said. “You still don’t know me.”
“I reckon I know enough,” she said.
Steelgrave gathered her against him. They held each other while watching the night-shrouded landscape pass by outside.
“Marshal?” she asked.
“Yeah?”
“I do know one dang thing,” she said.
“Ha, what’s that?”
“I know you ain’t a bad man. Maybe you were or some nonsense, maybe you think ya are. But you ain’t now, and that’s all that matters to me.”
Risking the intake of radioactive air particles and sand, he lowered his mask. “Show me how Zoe Zeta would kiss that marooned Lineage man.”
“In episode seventy-eight?” she breathed, as if she’d witnessed some Cepheid miracle at midnight in her underwear. “The extended version, with that alternate soundtrack and all?”
“Yeah, that one,” he said.
Ori’s eyes widened, then she lowered her mask. “Sure, okay. But they kissed all through the end credits.”
“Good,” Steelgrave said.
Their lips brushed as Slushie yelled over the comm.
“Hang on back here, we have incoming. Bogeys inbound!”
16
“There is no little enemy.”
- Catalonian aphorism
Ori Jo yanked her mask back on. Her voice crackled on the radio.
“Not now, you big horndog galoot! Get that breather on before you get all sick.”
Slushie snickered. “I swear, you two better not be fucking back there, because we’re about to get into the shit, and I’m going to be soooo hurt if you two left me out. Because I’m not fucking that old priest.”
Steelgrave put his mask back on and hurried to the bridge. “Nobody’s fucking anyone back here. What’s the story on the bogeys?”
The wind from the open airlock made the bandit posters along Molly’s cabins flap like bats flexing their wings in that cave he’d told Ori Jo about.
As they entered the bridge, Slushie glanced up from her terminal screen.
“Glad to see you two hitting it off,” Slushie said. “Noooow, how about telling me what the hell those things are? I have Molly’s railgun ready, but in atmosphere, that thing will plow through those things and leave a fucking crater bigger than Malvado’s asshole.”
“I’m not asking how you know how large that is,” Steelgrave said.
“Heh, that bandit cunt wished he could have me,” Slushie said, and frowned.
“What is it?” he asked, trying to strap into one of the seats.
“These bogeys aren’t giving off any transponder signals I recognize, or engine signatures I’ve seen before,” Slushie said. “I think they’re…drones?”
Drones. Steelgrave had only seen the automated machines in spaceports or among MEC naval crews. Very few settler communities used them, due to fears of the Prestige. For someone to utilize them way out on Pavo Dos, to possibly intercept an incoming pirate transport, worried Steelgrave. Their presence communicated plenty of resources, wealth, and a certain degree of autonomy. He wondered if they belonged to Julia Sentiri, his ticket offworld.
Offworld. He glanced at Ori Jo, who was buckled into the other passenger seat. He wondered if the young gunfighter would leave with him, depart Pavo Dos when he did, and seek their fortune across the Spur together. Or if he really wanted her to. Emotions and hormones played havoc with a person’s decision-making skills.
“Fuck, they’re less than six hundred meters from us now,” Slushie said, who flew Molly Zero around a dust storm that had erupted over the desert. The ping and scratch of sand sounded against the starship’s hull. Though Steelgrave knew there was no danger, Ori didn’t, and it showed on her horrified features. He tried to reassure her.
“Deputy, it’s going to be fine, Slushie knows what she’s doing.”
“It sounds like it might tear through us like last month’s diarrhea!” Ori Jo cried.
“See, that’s why I don’t stay on these backwater worlds for too long,” Slushie said. “You have all kinds of nasty problems out here, ummmkay?”
“What about our current problem?” Steelgrave asked.
Slushie brought up fire control for Molly’s railgun and singe missile tube, then she grunted in surprise. “Hey, they’re flying around us, in tandem. Like some sort of fucking Meccer escort, when you fly onto their fancier worlds or spaceports.”
“They don’t want to shoot us down,” Steelgrave said. “They want us to land.”
He pointed at her terminal screen, but Slushie saw it and slapped his hand away.
“No touching, Marshal Man, not while I’m flying anyway,” she said. “Farm Gal, you make your man behave, ummmkay? I’ll be goddamned. Wooow. I wasn’t expecting this, nope, not at all.”
The drones led them to the Aquarii Biogen compound Santiago had described—straight to an empty landing pad on the north side of the facility.
Steelgrave peeked out the viewport. Darkness and the edges of the storm obscured the compound from view, save for a few blue-white spheres. He assumed they were the facility’s exterior light poles. Only rich individuals—or a corporation could afford the blue-white bulbs. Most settlements had the harsh yellow-white ones that made everyone look sicker than they were.
Molly Zero’s radio crackled to life.
“This is Aquarii Biogen Compound Six, Delta Pavonis II affiliate,” a monotonous female voice said. “We have you on a designated approach flightpath, acknowledge.”
Slushie blew out a breath, then replied. “This is Molly Zero of Zeno’s Killjoys, copy that. We have a, um, passenger onboard that asked we deliver them to you.”
“Please state the identity of the passenger,” the voice said.
“What’s that old fucker’s name?” Slushie asked.
“Father Santiago, er, Ramirez,” Ori Jo said.
“Santiago Ramirez,” Slushie said.
A new voice spoke over the comm. Male, and annoyed. One of the Norsk Rom cultural enclave accents; German or Austrian.
“Who gave you permission to enter our airspace, much less bring that priest here? Zeno will have to answer for this. I cannot cover for this continued stupidity unless there is a very good reason. I can always hire other smugglers.”
Steelgrave patched into Molly’s comm. “This is MEC Deputy Marshal Brox Steelgrave, Delta Pavonis sector. I am bringing Santiago here as part of an investigation.”
The voice laughed. “Why didn’t you say so, Steelgrave? I will have the servants prepare the wine.”
Slushie glanced at him with suspicious, raised brows. Ori Jo pulled her mask off and regarded him with angry shock.
“Marshal, whatcha been doing on this here planet?”
“I wish I knew,” he muttered.
Slushie laughed without humor as she landed Molly Zero on the pad. “That cute holo badge is real, right? Yeaaah. Thought as much, the way you did that stuff back at Malvado’s. I’ve worked with corrupt lawmen before, but there was something off about you. You’ve been in the right place at the right fucking time, too many times. You’re sort of too big and dangerous for anyone to do anything about it—yet.”
Steelgrave unbuckled and hesitated as Ori Jo thrust herself up from her own seat. “Ori, why are you angry, you said you suspected--”
“It ain’t the same as actually knowing,” she said.
Before she left the bridge, he barred her path. “Listen. I still want to find out what the hell is going on. That’s the only way I get off this planet. That’s the only way you can do what you want, instead of…”
“Following a liar around?” Ori Jo asked. “Just tell me that our talk back there was real. Tell me that, and I’ll follow ya anywhere.”
Slushie still sat in the pod, watching them with more than a little surprise. “She’s a keeper, marshal. Or whoever the fuck you are, I don’t care. You’re not shooting me or these settlers, and that’s saying something for a Duster shithole like this one.”
